


Fortuna Favet

by Mipeltaja



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Character Study, First Kiss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-24
Updated: 2015-03-24
Packaged: 2018-03-19 10:53:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3607434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mipeltaja/pseuds/Mipeltaja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newton seemed to think one could invoke good fortune simply by being bold enough or loud enough, a notion Hermann found utterly ridiculous.</p>
<p>It wasn't that Hermann didn't believe chance could on occasion work in his favour, it was just that life had taught him not to rely on it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fortuna Favet

**Author's Note:**

> I know how to pluralize Kaiju - Hermann doesn’t. Not until the Drift, anyway.

Of all the subjects on which he and Newton had disagreed over the years - and there were many - the fundamental nature of luck was not one Hermann had ever really expected to become an issue. Oh, certainly Newton was an unrepentant optimist, his glass ever half full, and yes, Hermann envied him that unshakeable confidence in things’ tendency to sort themselves out in the end - but Hermann had never considered himself a pessimist, as such. A pessimist, in Hermann’s opinion, would have taken one look at the numbers and concluded that humanity stood no chance, leaving the PPDC to fight this losing war on their own, instead of staying to run himself ragged in an effort to help in whatever way he could. But Hermann _believed_ in the Jaeger program. He sincerely did. He knew the odds, and wasn’t going to pretend they were in humanity’s favour, but the only real alternative that Hermann could see was to give up, and he’d never known how to do that.

Still, he was not like Newton. At no point in his life had he ever had any reason to think anything would work out in his favour by pure chance, and given the current state of things, he saw little reason to start now.

So no, he and Newton did not exactly see eye to eye on the subject, but it didn’t really _matter_. Not when there was no shortage of arguments to be had about matters that were much more pressing, and therefore no reason to waste energy on philosophical disagreements.

At least, such had been Hermann’s view before today. Before Newton had disregarded the opinions of three separate people who had a better understanding of the mechanics of the Drift than he did - multiple doctorates or no - and Drifted with a damned Kaiju, apparently because he had genuinely believed his luck would see him through. Before Hermann had found him, bleeding and insensate in the aftermath of that first Drift - and before Marshall Pentecost had given the order to do it again.

Now, Hermann knew with terrifying certainty that Newton’s unwavering trust in his own luck seeing him through could and did translate to taking risks that would one day cost him his life.

It hadn’t happened with the ill-advised Drift with the Kaiju brain - for which no one, likely not even Newton himself, was more grateful than Hermann - and maybe it wouldn’t even happen on this quest for another brain, but it _would_ happen, eventually. Hermann was too intimately familiar with probability theory to believe otherwise.

He could have voiced his misgivings about the mission Newton was about to undertake - should have, probably - but he couldn’t, in that moment, find it in himself to break a decade-long habit of hiding his fondness and his worry under a layer of bristles and a healthy coat of venom. So he did what he’d always done, which was to argue.

“I still think this is a terrible idea,” he said, and hated that it came out so much easier than ‘ _I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t come back in one piece_ ’.

“Yeah,” Newton said, too preoccupied with digging around his desk in search of something to even look at Hermann. “So you keep telling me.”

“And it will most likely be a waste of everyone’s time,” Hermann continued. He wanted this to be a fight, _needed_ one, but Newton refused to bite.

“Yeah, well, it’s the Marshal’s orders now. Out of my hands,” Newton paused to peer under a stack of papers. “Out of yours, come to that. Have you seen my blacklight? The one that’s like a small flashlight. I swear I just used it the other day.”

Hermann wanted to scream. He wanted to say he didn’t _care_ whose orders they were, because it was sheer madness for Newton to be going off into the bone slums armed only with a torch and a piece of cardstock - but he had to admit the Marshall’s decision was the only logical one under the circumstances; Newton had uncovered information that could prove pivotal, but if they were to make any use of it they would need the full picture. At the same time, no one else in the Shatterdome could be trusted to know a Kaiju’s brain from its pancreas, let alone know if any piece they might be able to procure would be functional enough to drift with, and so it had to be Newton.

So Hermann kept his mouth shut and stalked to his own desk. He picked up Newton’s UV torch from among a collection of hard drives, where it had been sitting for most of the past week. One of these days, he thought grimly, in the event that the world didn’t end tonight, they would have to have another talk about how the dividing line on the lab floor existed to keep equipment - not just Kaiju bits - on the appropriate side, and how it should not have repeatedly fallen to Hermann to return Newton’s things to their proper places after he inexplicably yet inevitably found them on his side.

“Oh, hey,” Newton said when he noticed his torch in Hermann’s hand, his expression so bright and inexplicably _cheerful_ that all Hermann could do was to glare as he thrust the damned thing at Newton.

“You’re going to _actually_ kill yourself this time. I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Newton wasn’t even listening anymore. He grabbed his ridiculous leather jacket from where it was draped over a bass drum - why did he even keep all of that junk in the lab? - and placed his torch between his teeth for a few seconds while he slipped his arms into the sleeves.

“I take it I won’t be getting a kiss for good luck,” he grumbled, apparently more to himself than to Hermann, and turned to leave.

Hermann scoffed, because wasn’t that just bloody _typical_. The nonsense about wanting a kiss aside - and never mind the treacherous butterfly flutter it evoked somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach - it was ‘fortune favours the brave’ all over again, and it was infuriating. Hermann wished dearly he could just wash his hands of this impossible man and be done with it. Thus, he let Newton walk away without further comment.

 

He came to regret that decision when, barely an hour later, the harsh wail of the Kaiju alarm blared through the base and he was half convinced his insides were trying to twist themselves into actual knots as he rushed to LOCCENT to confirm what he already knew: a double event, just as the numbers had told him. Just as he had told the Marshal.

At first, Hermann was mostly worried for the pilots. Then, after _Cherno_ and _Typhoon_ fell, and _Striker_ was incapacitated, he feared that the war was already lost, that humanity’s days were numbered. After _Danger_ swooped in to save the day and the fighting moved onto land, he was only terrified for Newton, who was out there somewhere and likely couldn’t be trusted to keep out of harm’s way.

As absurd as it was, the foremost thought in his mind when they watched the Jaeger rise from the rubble after its fall from the sky was that he should have given Newton that kiss.

He knew Newton hadn’t meant it seriously, obviously, but he should have done it anyway. He should’ve held him close and kissed his mouth and jaw and neck and told him to be so, so careful out there.

But he hadn’t, had he? He’d let habit get the best of him, and now it might already be too late.

Hermann decided then that if he was ever allowed to see Newton alive again, Newton would have that damn kiss. He could have as many as he liked, just so long as he didn’t die out there. It was silly superstition - and not even that, not really, but Hermann was powerless to do anything but try to bargain with fate.

 

Perhaps for the first time in his life, fate decided to be kind to Hermann Gottlieb. When he found Newton - scratched and bruised and with his clothes torn and glasses cracked, but most reassuringly _alive_ \- Hermann wanted nothing more than to pull him into a tight embrace and not let go, ever, come hell or high water. The need to touch, to comfort, to protect was like a physical, constricting force in his throat that made it hard for him to breathe.

He did none of that, though, because there was no time for useless sentimentality right then. There wasn’t much time for anything at all, with two new Kaijus already out of the Breach so soon after the previous two. Two new Kaijus where there should have been three. Anyone else might have considered it a bit of good luck, or a flaw in his predictive model, but Hermann knew the numbers, and he knew there was no mistake, and there most definitely was nothing _lucky_ about the situation. There never had been.

Before he had even fully realized the enormity of what he was doing, Hermann found himself entering the code for a second helmet into the machine. And surely that had to be worth more than any kiss? It certainly felt like it ought to be.

So he offered - no, he invited himself along for the ride, and Newton didn’t refuse. He couldn’t afford to.

And of course after the Drift, there was still no time to waste. The helicopter ride back to the Shatterdome passed in anxious silence, and after that there was the mad dash to LOCCENT and the nail-biting tension as everyone waited for the bomb to go off, for life signs from the pilots’ escape pods.

Then, finally, relief when they heard Becket’s voice, Mako’s laughter, and the War Clock was stopped at long last.

Newton slung an arm around Hermann’s shoulders, and there, finally, was the right moment, or as close an approximation of one as he was ever likely to get. He snaked his arm around Newton’s waist and pulled him away from the crowd. Newton allowed it without objections, grinning from ear to ear the entire time, but as soon as they turned the corner into an empty hallway, he stopped. Any questions Hermann might have asked died on his lips when Newton turned to face him and pulled him down into a kiss.

A distant part of Hermann registered a measure of disappointment at not being the one to initiate the kiss, but the rest of him was only too eager to reciprocate. He pulled Newton closer, and for a moment nothing mattered but the way Newton’s body felt flush against his, their mouths pressed together.

Newton broke the kiss and rested his head on Hermann’s shoulder.

“Okay, so I’m about five minutes away from crashing, but do you wanna come back to mine and sleep for the next hundred years or whatever?”

Hermann couldn’t recall ever hearing a more appealing suggestion. He nodded and they set off in the direction of the living quarters.

 

By the time they’d made it to Newton’s room and closed the door behind them, the adrenalin had drained from Hermann as well, leaving him with a boneless feeling in his limbs and the kind of dull ache in his lower back that would likely make standing very uncomfortable once he woke up. He didn’t have the energy to worry about the future right now, though. It was all he’d done for the past ten years and he deserved to only concentrate on the present for a change. And in the present, it was enough of a chore to get undressed for bed. A shower would have been ideal, especially for Newton, but they were both just too tired.

Then at last they were both under the covers, Newton’s chest to Hermann’s back and his arms around Hermann’s waist.

“So,” Newton murmured against Hermann’s neck. “I’m probably the luckiest asshole on the face of the planet.”

Whatever his opinion on luck and its base properties, Hermann found he couldn’t deny that Newton did seem to have a lot of it. He hoped his sleepy “mm-hmm” communicated as much.

“You know why I think that?” Newton sounded like he was already half asleep, too, but seemed intent on following through on this conversation.

“Because you survived no fewer than four brushes with death in the past twenty-four hours, three of which involved being pursued by a Kaiju.”

“Nah,” Newton said, yawning. “Or - I mean, yeah, that too. But mostly ‘cause I have you looking out for my reckless ass.”

Hermann felt no need to argue with that.


End file.
